Chocolate Month, Week 1 - Jeni's Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World
Kicking things off with a recipe from Jeni of Jeni's Ice Cream.
Compared to when the company first began, Jeni’s is a bit more corporate these days. I suppose when you’re selling your ice cream in mass quantities at Whole Foods, such a shift is inevitable. But the growth of Jeni’s probably explains why they shortened the name of this week’s ice cream from “The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World” to “Jeni’s Darkest Chocolate.” It makes sense; the current name is much easier to market. I don’t know if the ingredients have changed in the current version, but I’m fairly certain they no longer add any coffee to it (more on that in a moment).
For this week’s effort, we’re using the recipe for the older, longer-named version, which comes from Jeni’s first cookbook. But lucky for me/us, the recipe was also published online by Savuer magazine a number of years ago, making it available for free. 😎
Jeni’s approach to making ice cream—for those who don’t remember…which is probably most of you, because why would you remember?—involves using tapioca starch, tapioca syrup, and cream cheese to achieve a smooth, creamy, scoopable texture. She says you can substitute corn starch and corn syrup, which is what I did.
First thing I did was make the cornstarch slurry (milk and cornstarch).
Once that’s made, you set it aside and add the cream, milk, sugar, and corn syrup to a pot and heat it up.
Once you get the mixture nice and hot for about 4 minutes, add in the cornstarch slurry. I did achieve this step, but I failed to photo-document it.
After cooking the mixture with the cornstarch for about 2 additional minutes, you have to incorporate the cream cheese into the base. After making Jeni’s base a number of times over the years, I’ve learned two things in this regard. First off, letting the cream cheese soften to room temperature is critical—I’ve found out the hard way that if you skip that step, it won’t incorporate smoothly. Second, you have to intermittently add small amounts of milk to the cream cheese while whisking, as that produces a silky texture which signals that the cream cheese has fully incorporated.
At this point, the base is finished.
The last step is making the chocolate sauce. In retrospect, I should have made the chocolate sauce first, but oh well, shit happens. The key thing to note is that Jeni’s recipe calls for 1/2 cup of brewed coffee as the liquid for the sauce. I decided to use water instead to ensure this remained a strictly chocolate affair.
I also recently picked up a new trick (somewhere out there on the internet, I can’t recall where) for chopping chocolate: use a serrate knife. It works!
The sauce is comprised of four ingredients: 1/2 cup cocoa powder, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup water (or coffee) and 1.5 oz chopped bittersweet chocolate. You heat all of that up in a suace pan until the chocolate is fully melted, and then add it to the base.
I left the mixture in the fridge for about 24 hours before churning.
I have to say, the base looked amazing pre-churn. Very smooth, thick, and luxurious. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a churn video again this week! 😤
Anyhoo, the churning went well enough, but I must not have attached the paddle correctly, as demonstrated by these photos.
As you can see, some of the base spilled into the inside of the churning well and also got into the inner part of the churning pail. Honestly, I have no idea how this happened. My best guess is, as I said above, I didn’t fit the paddle or the churning pail into the well properly. But whatever…other than creating an absolute mess, the ice cream came out looking just fine.
And now, onto the results.
If you can’t tell from the picture, this came out great. An absolute homerun, in fact. My daughter described it as being like a fudgy brownie in ice cream form; I think that describes it quite well. There was the slightest whisper of iciness in the texture, but honestly, I didn’t care one bit. It was completely delicious and super creamy, almost to the point of being addictive. I could have polished off the whole pint in one sitting, it’s that good.
Okay, okay, I’ve seen enough! I’m calling Week 1 of Chocolate Month an unqualified success! I’ll definitely be making this recipe again in the future.
That’s all for this week. See you all next week, when we’ll be making Melissa Clark’s version of Chocolate Ice Cream!